Summary of the paper

Title A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate
Authors Marilyn Walker, Jean Fox Tree, Pranav Anand, Rob Abbott and Joseph King
Abstract Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of freely available, unscripted argumentative dialogs. This paper presents the Internet Argument Corpus (IAC), a set of 390,704 posts in 11,800 discussions extracted from the online debate site 4forums.com. A 2866 thread/130,206 post extract of the corpus has been manually sided for topic of discussion, and subsets of this topic-labeled extract have been annotated for several dialogic and argumentative markers: degrees of agreement with a previous post, cordiality, audience-direction, combativeness, assertiveness, emotionality of argumentation, and sarcasm. As an application of this resource, the paper closes with a discussion of the relationship between discourse marker pragmatics, agreement, emotionality, and sarcasm in the IAC corpus.
Topics Dialogue, Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Discourse annotation, representation and processing
Full paper A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate
Bibtex @InProceedings{WALKER12.1078,
  author = {Marilyn Walker and Jean Fox Tree and Pranav Anand and Rob Abbott and Joseph King},
  title = {A Corpus for Research on Deliberation and Debate},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  month = {may},
  date = {23-25},
  address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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